https://twitter.com/nytdavidbrooks/status/1704668479259820413
Not loving that I feel compelled to defend David Brooks here, but this is about as correct as he has been in recent years. He missed the other half which is that the person who served it to him probably makes less in an hour than his 17 dollar burger and fries.
Yeah the whole airport food thing is like a perfect encapsulation of why America basically sucks.
There is some shit company that basically has a monopoly at NY airports, I forget the name, but all those “restaurants” serve the same dogshit cafeteria food for totally outrageous prices while the employees make nothing. I’m sure the contract was obtained corruptly, there is no more efficient incinerator of money than the port authority of NY/NJ.
1 Like
Yeah if you’re going to overcharge for food the least you can do is what the Austin airport did and use it as an opportunity to showcase the cities food. I’ll admit I’m not a huge fan of the exact restaurants that are at the airport, but for airport food the upper mid tier of a major cities food is muuuuuuuch better than typical airport food. Yes I agree that Salt Lick is tourist BBQ and that Tacodeli is basically white people doing what white people do to the breakfast tacos… but in both cases we’re talking about fairly successful restaurants that charge pretty much the airport prices somewhere that isn’t the airport.
How many people are looking at the picture and thinking that whisky is a soda? It’s a dumb exaggeration that he didn’t need to make $17 for a crappy hamburger is bad enough. How many “normal” people are spending $60 on cocktails in an airport bar?
David Brooks doesn’t personally know anyone who makes <200k a year who doesn’t also have a trust fund.
You’d think someone who flew commercial would be more in touch with the working man…
The conversations I hear from first class in the extra legroom seats suggest they are mostly very out of touch boomers and born rich younger people very similar to David Brooks.
1 Like
MSP has a bunch of local restaurants in the airport too. I rarely eat there but at least there are decent options.
This isn’t an airport food thing though, newark food was reasonably priced last time I was there. He just drank a bunch of whiskey
The price of whiskey is too damn high.
2 Likes
Mmm Juicy Lucy at the Stone Arch (?) right at the left end of the mall.
Rupert murdoch stepped down, hands over to son
He’s dead in 3 months imo
2 Likes
Fyp
1 Like
1 Like
Yep, I mean $17.50 for the burger and fries, figure at least $2.50 for a soft drink, you’re at $20. Add tax and you’re at $21.50 probably, then throw in a 20% tip, round it up to $5 and you’re at $26.50. The food itself probably cost like $2-3, and the server is probably making $5.26 per hour (NJ tipped minimum wage) or slightly more.
And let’s be honest, these aren’t like outrageous airport markups. The prices are outrageous but it’s hard to get a sandwich, a side, and drinks or a burrito and a drink from something a step above McDs for less than, I dunno, $15? We are preparing the vast majority of our meals at home so other than while traveling I don’t really know.
Our entire economy is engineered almost perfectly to extract the absolute maximum from the common person, while making it virtually impossible for them to organize and get leverage.
Although we may be seeing it snap back in that regard, and when it does it’s probably gonna snap back hard.
1 Like
You know, the intersection of this $17 burger and the migrant teenage workers getting limbs chopped off article posted by @SensiblePerson really points to just how far our late stage capitalism has been pushed. Everything is engineered for max profit extraction, and as many people as possible who can be pushed into positions of desperation from which they’ll be forced into cheap labor are being pushed.
Sooner or later it has to break, right? (Natalie Portman meme …right???)
Like, a few too many kids get a few too many limbs chopped off and the NYT runs a few too many stories with sad pictures, and suddenly people notice and say hey that’s a little too fucked up, so politicians are like, "Jesus guys did you have to take it Perdue and Tyson can’t pay minimum wage (if not lower) to migrant teens living four to a trailer in a trailer park slum. Now they’ve gotta pay an extra $5-10 an hour, and suddenly chicken prices go up.
Now the server making $5.26 an hour plus tips can’t afford to feed her kids chicken nuggets after serving assholes like David Brooks their $17 burger and $50 Scotch for a $7 tip because who tips 20% on Scotch in this economy???
So now Tyson has a problem because they can’t sell enough chickens at the new prices and suddenly their staple good is a luxury product for the upper middle class, which means earnings are down and some asshole at corporate HQ is frantically asking ChatGPT how to make white collar workers crave Chicken Cordon Bleu and shit.
But that doesn’t work cause the upper middle class thinks they deserve steak and salmon and shit, so now Perdue and Tyson are kind of fucked. And every other company relying on consumer spending from the bottom 50% starts seeing similar issues as a tight labor market and repulsion to motherfucking literally feeding kids into a meat grinder for capitalism means the current model doesn’t work and fuck, does ChatGPT know how to turn a profit on this shit with a higher labor input?
Cause the CEOs sure as fuck aren’t coming up with the obvious answer of cutting their own pay, and a third of the country would rather feed immigrants to fucking alligators instead of throwing the doors open to increase the labor supply and help the economic engine run, so here we fucking go… The show goes on.
Jokes on me though the reality is we’ll just see more desperate parents pulling double shifts while their kids watch TV alone until they’re old enough to work in the bright future of USA#1, so til they’re like 11.
But don’t worry the establishment Democrats will be right on top of this and looking out for those kiddos by creating the Department of Child Labor and OSHKASH (Occupational Safety and Health of Kiddos Agency of Supervision and Happiness), and all they’ll trade to the Republicans to make sure it’s bipartisan is a lower minimum wage for workers under 14 and a guarantee that none of the safety standards apply to immigrants or their kids.
2 Likes
BTW, if anyone hasn’t read this, I can’t recommend it enough. Super long read by modern media standards, but it’s worth it.
2 Likes
Good post, and my thinking has gone down similar paths. A few reactions…
Maybe, I hope so. Sometimes I feel like it’s a race between the wealthy and powerful achieving total control over the rest of us, vs. the rest of us getting organized and forcing big changes.
Unfortunately I think this is very unlikely. If it is going to come about, it’s going to come from labor organizing.
There’s two prongs to your scenario: people suddenly caring more, and politicians being responsive to what people want and doing something substantive.
I think we can set aside the possibility of politicians addressing the issues, for lots of reasons that we are all familiar with (structural advantages for R states, gerrymandering, bought and paid for Rs and Ds, etc.). From a school civics class perspective, it is theoretically possible, but in the real world, LOL. So…
That leaves people’s caring more to do the lifting. So what are the levers regular people have to try to change things? Boycotts? Here’s where we compare the power a person has as a consumer vs. as a worker.
How many people would have to boycott Purdue before they would even notice? Millions, tens of millions? Even then, any loss of revenue would probably only be visible in their financial dashboards if they really look hard, and then they’d probably attribute the loss to some other factor.
But how many workers organizing and going on strike would it take to fuck up their bottom line? A few hundred? A few thousand? Imagine their plants getting shut down in a strike. They’re turbo-fucked in short order unless they can get their product pipeline full again. At that point they have to make concessions. (Or call their bought and paid for politicians to bring the power and (potentially) violence of the state down on the workers, which is a real possibility that was a frequent occurrence back in the early 20th century.)
I know that scenario is overly rosy for lots of reasons, but much more achievable than the “vote for Ds and write letters to your elected officials” route.
I think you’ve identified something important, which is that this level of wealth disparity and hollowing out of anything between super rich and desperate poverty isn’t sustainable. Unfortunately the people in power don’t think long term, and to the degree that they do think about the future, they probably figure they’ve got theirs and can use their power to keep the ride going long enough for themselves and their kids to enjoy the high life.
(Throw in the climate disaster and the outlook gets even darker!)
I think the only way we’re getting off this track is for people to stop falling for the divide-and-conquer bullshit (racism, anti-LGBTQ hysteria, anti-immigrant nonsense, etc.), realize who the true enemies are, and organize to force change.
How to achieve that though, I don’t know. Honestly I’m not super optimistic…
Anyway, there’s a lot to discuss here, but this is a super long post, so I’ll leave it there for now.
2 Likes